For earlier history of the area, including Bohemia and Moravia as well as Czechoslovakia, see Czechoslovak region, history of.

The Czech Republic came into being on Jan. 1, 1993, upon the dissolution of the Czechoslovak federation. At the time of the separation, the federation’s assets were divided at a ratio of two to one in favour of the Czechs; special agreements were made for a natural-gas pipeline from Russia, the diplomatic service, and the armed forces. The citizens of the former federation also were divided on the basis of new nationality laws, and, immediately after partition, large numbers of Slovaks began applying for Czech citizenship.

Václav Havel, who had served as the first president of Czechoslovakia after the overthrow of the communists, was elected president of the republic in January 1993, and Václav Klaus became prime minister. Because there was as yet no Senate, the election was conducted only by the Chamber of Deputies, thus contravening the republic’s new constitution. Although the separation with Slovakia proceeded amicably—quickly dubbed the Velvet Divorce, in reference to the 1989 Velvet Revolution—customs posts were erected along the Czech-Slovak border, and signs of rising national tempers were briefly noted on both sides of the new frontier.

Under a centre-right coalition government—composed of the Civic Democratic Party, the Civic Democratic Alliance, and the Christian and Democratic Union–Czech People’s Party—the new Czech Republic pursued a fairly aggressive policy of political and economic reform, the cornerstone of which was a program of rapid privatization. On May 31–June 1, 1996, the Czech Republic held its first general election since the country had become a separate entity. The coalition government lost its parliamentary majority when the centre-left Czech Social Democratic Party nearly quadrupled the number of seats it had previously held in the Chamber of Deputies. Nevertheless, the coalition headed by Klaus and Havel remained in power, with a pledge of support from the Social Democrats. However, major economic problems, serious rifts within the ruling coalition, and public dissatisfaction with Klaus’s leadership and economic policy forced the prime minister’s resignation in November 1997. Klaus’s Civic Democratic Party then split into two factions. Jan Ruml, a former interior minister, founded a new conservative party, the Freedom Union, to which almost half of the Civic Democrat deputies defected.

Klaus, however, remained a political force and shortly after his resignation was reelected party chairman of the Civic Democratic Party. At the June 1998 elections his party won more than one-fourth of the votes; the Social Democrats won nearly one-third. President Havel, who had been reelected by a slim margin to a second term in January, called upon Social Democrat chairman Miloš Zeman (as the leader of the party with the largest number of seats in the Chamber of Deputies) to form a government, which was not initially successful. Eventually Zeman was installed as prime minister, and Klaus was elected to the chairmanship of the Chamber of Deputies.

The country’s domestic troubles during the mid- to late 1990s were to some extent mitigated by its acceptance into NATO. However, by the end of the 1990s, public dissatisfaction with the political leadership was growing. In early 1999, a group of prominent political writers issued Impuls 99, a declaration calling for decisive social, moral, and political change that would ensure the country’s rapid accession to the European Union (EU), to which it had formally applied for membership in 1996. In November 1999 activists who had been leaders during the 1989 revolution circulated a more radical manifesto, Thank You! Now Leave!, demanding the resignations of the leaders of all the major political parties for jeopardizing the Czech Republic’s acceptance into the EU. Tens of thousands of citizens took to the streets of Prague and other cities to demonstrate against the government. Another cause for concern was the spread of racial violence against the Roma (Gypsies).

On the other hand, in the realm of foreign policy, the Czech Republic experienced considerable success during the 1990s. In January 1997 Germany and the Czech Republic signed a document of reconciliation in which Germany acknowledged regret for its treatment of Czechs during the Nazi era, and the Czech Republic expressed remorse for Czechoslovakia’s expulsion of some three million Germans from the Sudeten region following World War II. Relations between Slovakia and the Czech Republic, however, remained tense for most of the 1990s, with some improvement in the early 21st century.

Klaus regained the political spotlight in 2003 when he became president at the conclusion of Havel’s decade-long tenure. Klaus, who was narrowly reelected by the Czech Parliament in February 2008, served alongside a series of prime ministers and cabinets beset by political infighting. Meanwhile, the Czech Republic had taken a historic step on May 1, 2004, when it became a member of the EU, and during the first half of 2009 the country assumed the rotating EU presidency. Some observers questioned the republic’s fitness to lead the EU when, in March 2009, the centre-right Czech government collapsed after losing a parliamentary vote of confidence. An A nonpartisan interim prime minister, Jan Fischer, took power in May.

In the same month, the Czech Senate voted in favour of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty (an agreement to reform certain EU institutions), which the lower house had already approved. Klaus, however, claimed that the treaty was not in the best interests of the Czech Republic and refused to sign it until that November 2009, when the Czech Constitutional Court ruled that the treaty did not threaten the Czech constitution. Klaus then reluctantly endorsed the treaty, completing the country’s ratification process. The Czech Republic thus became the last of the 27 EU members to ratify the Lisbon Treaty.

Meanwhile, the country’s interim government remained in power for more than a year, until July 2010, when President Klaus appointed a fellow Civic Democrat, Petr Nečas, as prime minister. Nečas headed a new coalition government comprising the Civic Democratic Party and two other right-of-centre parties. Although the Czech Social Democratic Party had garnered the most votes in the parliamentary elections held in late May, the three centre-right parties together had won a majority.